27 Aug
2011
27 Aug
'11
2:31 p.m.
On 08/27/2011 05:23 PM, Toby Thain wrote:
Of course. (and I knew someone was going to pipe up...this group is
WAY too anal ;))
And those things are the ones I'm talking about. We will never lose
the spec for the JFIF file format because the whole world uses it. We
will also never lose (assuming we have it now) the PERQ image file
format because there are people like us around.
Yes, there are fringe cases, and some information WILL be lost. But
do you honestly think it's the same percentage as it was, say, in 1960?
Or even 1980? Not even close. THAT is my point.
Yes. There are always exceptions and fringe cases.
Because we will make it so, and pass it on to future generations.
Bulk replication of data like that is trivial now. It wasn't just a few
short years ago.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL
... I think
society is long past the point where
information, at least most of it, just disappears from generation to
generation.
There are many ways it can disappear, and still does. As soon as a book
is removed from public libraries, and is out of print, it's effectively
gone. The mitigating factor are secondary markets like ABE Books - but
that only goes so far, and assumes you have a budget to find something. Of course a
lot of people will argue that, pointing out obscure things
which have been lost, or are at risk of being lost due to their
obscurity, but I'm talking about things like...well, the JFIF image
format. (what is commonly yet erroneously called "JPEG")
Certain things are so ubiquitous we can dismiss them, yes. Even old,
proprietary, vendor-specific formats like BMP are trivial to
find documentation for.
*Some* are trivial. Some are difficult. And others are impossible, as I
know from past searches. Some formats
have even survived fruitless,
misguided attempts to make a quick buck by teams of lawyers at
short-sighted corporations run by stupid people (GIF).
Thanks to efforts like Bitsavers, technical documentation is at
nowhere near the level of risk it was even as recently as a decade ago.
Why do you think Bitsavers is permanent? ;-)